Would tanks be okay if SE swapped the damage between tank and healers?

[Shurrikhan]

Healers take a damage loss during prog where they may have to cast their basic GCD AoE heals, or maybe the tanks aren't mitigating properly and the healer has to cast GCD heals to keep them alive. Every GCD spent on topping people up is a loss of over 200 potency for every healer.

Of 420 melee-DPS potency, and over 500 tank potency, since tanks have a damage nerf baked into their unique damage formulas and healers (like casters) have a 30% damage bonus over melee baked in via traits.

That said, it begs a further question:
If tanks insist on having a greater and greater portion of sustain, what is that sustain meant to carry as a reward?

So long as the fight ends by reducing the enemy's HP to 0, all contribution --no matter how indirect-- is ultimately via more quickly reducing the enemy's HP to 0 (even if through a bit more uptime via Expedient, a healer GCD saved, or whatever else). The primary way tank sustain contributes to rDPS outside of not needing to be rezzed is just... more healer offensive GCDs. But you can only push that sustain so far before it becomes redundant, failing to provide any difference to clear time or chance of success.

Why, then, would having excess sustain be in the tank's interest? And similarly, why would it be in the tank's interest to have higher maximum damage than healers, thereby reducing the relative value of proper use of sustain (rewarded through increased healer DPS)?

[CaptainLagbeard]

Looking at just base potencies of attacks...

The main 3 hit Weaponskill combos of all the tanks

WAR, 220 - 340 - 480, averages to 346.6 and they get their 10% extra damage buff from doing their combo.
DRK, 300 - 380 - 480, averages to 386,6.
GNB, 300 - 380 - 460, 380 average.

PLD is a bit of a special case due to Atonement and Divine Might...

But for those 3, them just doing using their GCDs would be equivalent of healers spamming Glare, Broil, Malefic or Dosis... But due to their higher potency, they'd still out DPS the healers and that's not even accounting for all their other attacks. For healers, these other attacks barely exist aside from the DoT. And the DoTs aren't quite going to pull the DPS of Upheaval and Inner Release, or whatever else the other tanks have.

[Shurrikhan]

I mean, you'd want to do pp2m counts anyways for any thorough comparison, but my point was that not all potency are equal.

300 tank potency >>> 300 melee potency >> 300 ranger potency > 300 caster/healer potency.

Tanks suffer a hidden output nerf inside their attack power formulas (and consequently to their damage at a given item level), as they have since Vit was first given Attack Power contribution (to stop tanks from equipping Slaying rings, before they just made ring types role-exclusive... wasting that effort and giving no excuse for this lingering nonsense), iirc.

300 healer/caster potency hits 30% harder than 300 melee potency because the Maim and Mend traits increase their damage by 30% before all else.

300 ranger potency hits 20% harder than 300 melee potency because the Job Action Bonus traits increase their damage by 20% before all else.

That being in the game is just unnecessary confounding BS compared to simply adjusting the raw potencies for each, I'll agree, but it's something we need to keep in mind in considering outputs against each other (e.g., in a shared "effective potency" measurement).

[Wayfinder3]

Strongly disagree - if all classes do the same damage then you will see a strong skew toward a "meta" which once known will just cast out any other class and ultimately result in further class homogenization and saying the raise doesn't matter really seems at risk of sounding rude a naïve assumption; further the logic of tanks doing more damage then healers I feel is largely because of the fact that the only reason OT's are required in groups is due to tank swap mechanics; if a OT is not needed for a tank swap then they are essentially a filler dps whereas "most" groups in high end content are not getting by with only 1 healer so both are constantly doing something.

You see that anyway however that only matters for less than 1% of the community. Nobody was locking mch out of progression groups or hindering their ability to play. so tbh, its not that big of a deal

[GoatOfWar]

Looking at just base potencies of attacks...

The main 3 hit Weaponskill combos of all the tanks

WAR, 220 - 340 - 480, averages to 346.6 and they get their 10% extra damage buff from doing their combo.
DRK, 300 - 380 - 480, averages to 386,6.
GNB, 300 - 380 - 460, 380 average.

PLD is a bit of a special case due to Atonement and Divine Might...

But for those 3, them just doing using their GCDs would be equivalent of healers spamming Glare, Broil, Malefic or Dosis... But due to their higher potency, they'd still out DPS the healers and that's not even accounting for all their other attacks. For healers, these other attacks barely exist aside from the DoT. And the DoTs aren't quite going to pull the DPS of Upheaval and Inner Release, or whatever else the other tanks have.

That's not how that works.
300 potency for healers translates to more damage than 300 potency on tanks because of job traits.
The tanks do have a wider array of abilities though. They have removed a bunch of healer dps buttons over the years that kinda left behind that void.
Warrior, PLD and Gunbreaker have some really strong GCD's. And Dark knight has some really strong OGCD's. But what *really* separates the tanks from the healers is that the tank's dps profile synergises better with the burst. You could frontload half of Sage's dps and it would be on par with the tanks. Because it would be able to fit all of that damage into the burst.

[Aravell]

I think that only works logically if you discount the impact that healing has on current fight design as many mechanics require both healers to be healing; by contrast most fights do not require most tanks to be constantly tanking and thus the function of the OT is largely minimal - which is my "theory" as to why tanks have higher DPS then healers to allow them to contribute to the fight in a significant fashion while they await the once in a few moment OT mechanic that is the only reason you bring them rather then another DPS to begin with.

I want to point out that in large parts of any given fight, a healer does not need to be constantly healing either, so why is the off tank compensated for not needing to be useful all the time while healers don't get any such compensation?

All that aside, you bring the off tank to fulfill the condition of a mechanic in the fight (tank swap) so you don't wipe, it's the same as people bringing healers, so that they get the safety net of more healing and don't wipe. Why should tanks be uniquely compensated for it?

If a group can do some very specific tactic to clear the fight with only one tank, let them. The community sees no issue with dropping a healer, so why should there be any issue with dropping a tank?

It looks very much like tanks are getting special treatment for some undetermined reason.

[GoatOfWar]

It looks very much like tanks are getting special treatment for some undetermined reason.

The players just got accustomed to the continuously escalating powercreep.
The devs are too affraid to nerf and the players think nerfs are strictly bad.
They got a taste of the forbidden fruit and now they don't want to let go. But i think the job identity reworks will tackle that problem.
Because the devs will have plausible deniability to nerf problematic jobs. I just hope they stop listening to bald streamers for their design choices.

[Carighan]

If tanks insist on having a greater and greater portion of sustain, what is that sustain meant to carry as a reward? So long as the fight ends by reducing the enemy's HP to 0, all contribution --no matter how indirect-- is ultimately via more quickly reducing the enemy's HP to 0 (even if through a bit more uptime via Expedient, a healer GCD saved, or whatever else).

More relevant - to me - is that there's no point to this so long as its automated. If my 30% damage reduction buff gets bumped to a 40% + self-shield, I won't use it differently. It's for all intents and purposes the same ability as before, just... fancier.

And don't get me wrong, "fancy" can be super cool. I love the new Atonement chain, it looks amazing. But for gameplay purposes, if I am given a more active role in my sustain, I want to be active in that sustaining. The upgraded short CDs work well in that regard, since their strongest portion has to be timed well to work. Paladin healing also works well in that regard, since it's an active decision in the first place but also heals the Paladin. It's a bit underutilized on account of never being needed outside of no-healer groups, but the design is sound.

I just wish I had more of a hand in my own survival and keeping the enemy on me, and less just dealing damage like I'm a melee DPS that has all-face-positionals (also a criminally un-used concept, a melee DPS that has to stand in front of the boss a significant portion of the time!).

I just hope they stop listening to bald (...) for their design choices.

Ain't that the truth? Listening to the vocal part of your playerbase is nearly always a bad idea as a game dev, as the vocal players are only good for telling you what might be a problem, not how to solve it.

[Shurrikhan]

Listening to the vocal part of your playerbase is nearly always a bad idea as a game dev, as the vocal players are only good for telling you what might be a problem, not how to solve it.

Please forgive me if I'm misreading what you're going for here, but...

Why would more vocal players be any less able to point out a likely solution path than less vocal players? And why would the playerbase not necessarily handing the devs the solution on a silver platter mean that it's a bad idea to listen to them?

Critiques need to be taken in context, yes, but that doesn't mean they shouldn't be heard at all.

More relevant - to me - is that there's no point to this so long as its automated.

I just wish I had more of a hand in my own survival and keeping the enemy on me, and less just dealing damage like I'm a melee DPS that has all-face-positionals.

Fully agreed.

[Carighan]

Why would more vocal players be any less able to point out a likely solution path than less vocal players? And why would the playerbase not necessarily handing the devs the solution on a silver platter mean that it's a bad idea to listen to them?

Ah yeah sorry, I should have worded that better.

Thing is, this has been a concept since Blizzard talked candidly about it back in the early WoW days (and since then some other devs did, Awesomenauts for example), players by and large are quite good at telling you that something is annoying them, and to a degree what.
However, experience has shown (and this matches with my experience in business software, where similar issues exist if on a different level) that even in the context of explicitly being asked for feedback players are very bad at telling you why something is annoying to them, and what they would like instead.

The same actually goes for the flipside, albeit it's of course more rare as happy players don't leave feedback as often as unhappy ones: Players can tell you that they're happy and to a degree what makes them happy, but not really why that thing makes them happy and what should not change lest it'd no longer be awesome.

So basically, from player feedback, take the "if" and to a degree the "what" (at least as a general pointer) but not the "why" or the proposed fixes.

And that's not a negative in itself. Of course the onus should not be on the players to provide this, they're not developers. But it becomes a problem in the modern social media age as players of certain groups tend to form a sort-of cult around some bigger personalities, and in the process of which these personalities get paid for providing more and more and more detailed and more detailed thoughts, which also means they'll provide ideas and hence a large group of players takes these ideas as if they're their own.

And then as developers, you get peer-pressure to react to these influencer thoughts one way or the other. Which is a bit weird, as they're just one person, just with a bunch of people who likes hearing that voice blabber incessantly.

And like a project manager in business software, it becomes surprisingly difficult to ignore these "larger" voices sometimes, but listening to them can be utterly destructive, as in the end they're no better than any other random voice. And sometimes less so, because they focus on a thing that's less related to gameplay and more selling the appearance of gameplay, after all, that's how they make their money.

Sorry, got way too wordy. Point is, I don't mean devs should ignore player feedback, but they need to be careful to not read too much into it either. That's how we end up with homogenized jobs after all, players crying for balanced raid performance constantly.